I was shocked to read today that #IBM and Slack are partnering so that #Slack can use #Watson to improve their Slackbot’s cognitive capabilities. It seemed like Slack may be outsourcing the one thing that could become their most valuable strength. Except as I thought about it more, I wasn’t surprised. Slack may have been forced into this deal. I never thought I would write something like this, but Microsoft has just won a big strategic round against one of the Valley’s coolest tech startups. Here is what I think is happening.
I live pretty deeply in this world. Talla has launched three different Slack bots. But ultimately, we noticed that Slack was coming under pretty intense competition — most notably from Microsoft, but also, Google has to play here someday, right? Surely at some point Allo, or something like it, gets into Google Apps. So we made the strategic decision that messaging wouldn’t be a winner-take-all market, and possibly not even a small oligopoly. It may be very fragmented. Better to take an approach that plays to that fragmentation, which is why we ultimately made a different bet on a cross-platform ChatOps tool for HR teams.
No comments:
Post a Comment